Charles Blue Jacket (1817 – October 29, 1897) was a

Shawnee The Shawnee are an Algonquian-speaking indigenous people of the Northeastern Woodlands. In the 17th century they lived in Pennsylvania, and in the 18th century they were in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana and Illinois, with some bands in Kentucky a ...

chief in Kansas, as well as a

Methodist Methodism, also called the Methodist movement, is a group of historically related denominations of Protestant Christianity whose origins, doctrine and practice derive from the life and teachings of John Wesley. George Whitefield and John's ...

minister. He was the grandson of the Shawnee Chief

Blue Jacket Blue Jacket, or Weyapiersenwah (c. 1743 – 1810), was a war chief of the Shawnee people, known for his militant defense of Shawnee lands in the Ohio Country. Perhaps the preeminent American Indian leader in the Northwest Indian War, i ...

by his son George Blue Jacket. Charles' mother is unknown, but is believed to have been a Shawnee. His maternal grandmother was the daughter of a Shawnee woman and

Jacques Baby Jacques Bâby, dit Dupéron (1731 – August 1789) was a French Canadian fur trader who later became an employee of the British Indian Department. He worked in the Detroit area, where he acquired large amounts of land on both sides of the Detroi ...

. The younger Blue Jacket was born along the south banks of the Huron River in Michigan in what is today

Monroe County, Michigan Monroe County is a county in the U.S. state of Michigan. As of the 2020 Census, the population was 154,809. The largest city and county seat is Monroe. The county was established as the second county (after Wayne County) in the Michigan Ter ...

. However, a very short time after Blue Jacket's birth, the family moved to

Piqua, Ohio Piqua ( ) is a city in Miami County, southwest Ohio, United States, 27 miles north of Dayton. The population was 20,522 at the 2010 census. It is part of the Dayton Metropolitan Statistical Area. It was founded as the village of Washington in ...

. Blue Jacket was educated at the Quaker School in Piqua and mission schools in Kansas. The Blue Jacket family moved to Kansas in 1833. He served as an interpreter for the United States governor and was a farmer and businessman in what is today

Kansas City, Kansas Kansas City, abbreviated as "KCK", is the third-largest city in the U.S. state of Kansas, and the county seat of Wyandotte County. It is an inner suburb of the older and more populous Kansas City, Missouri, after which it is named. As of ...

and its vicinity. He raised large numbers of hogs and cattle.John P. Bowes. ''Exiles and Pioneers: Eastern Indians in the Trans-Mississippi West''. (Cambridge University Press, 2007) p. 230 Also, in 1855, Blue Jacket and two of his brothers opened a ferry on the

Wakarusa River The Wakarusa River is a tributary of the Kansas River, approximately long,U.S. Geological Survey. National Hydrography Dataset high-resolution flowline dataThe National Map accessed March 30, 2011 in eastern Kansas in the United States. It drains ...

at Lawrence, Kansas, called Blue Jacket's Crossing. He served as chief of the Shawnee tribe from 1861-1864. Two of his sons served in the Union Army during the American Civil War, and one of his daughters-in-law killed one of the raiders under

William Quantrill William Clarke Quantrill (July 31, 1837 – June 6, 1865) was a Confederate guerrilla leader during the American Civil War. Having endured a tempestuous childhood before later becoming a schoolteacher, Quantrill joined a group of bandits who ...

who had invaded her home. In 1869, Blue Jacket moved to Oklahoma with most of the other Shawnees. Bluejacket, Oklahoma, received its name because he settled nearby, and he served as the town's post master and as the minister of the town's Methodist Church.

References

Sources

a biography of Blue Jacketanother short article on Blue Jacket
{{DEFAULTSORT:Bluejacket, Charles People from Monroe County, Michigan People from Piqua, Ohio People from Kansas City, Kansas Native American leaders Methodist ministers 1817 births 1897 deaths 19th-century Shawnee people